Earlier today, LU ran in its Web Crawler section a headline reading “12 injured as Syrian ‘asylum seeker’ blows himself up outside wine bar in Germany.” The addition of the quotes around the phrase asylum seeker was intended to highlight the absurdity of the source headline, at Express, which used the same verbiage. (It’s a little ridiculous to call an immigrant from an admittedly war-torn nation “an asylum seeker” when he devises a plot to murder innocent civilians in the country that accepted him.)
We should have looked harder for a source to mock. Here is what the BBC concocted for the same story:
I am not kidding. @BBCNews website leaves the impression the Syrian suicide bomber as a victim in a 'German blast'. pic.twitter.com/M61HJcOoAE
— Tarek Fatah (@TarekFatah) July 25, 2016
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Rewriting a description of an act of terrorism in a way that converts the would-be murderer into a hapless victim is a new low even for the mainstream media. It is reminiscent of the old, no-longer-funny “joke” about the female blue-collar worker who shows up on the job with a black eye. When a concerned coworker asks what happened, she responds, “I walked into a door.” The woman thinks for a moment, then adds, “The door was drunk at the time.”
The BBC headline is an indication of how far the liberal press will go to promote the twin fictions that (1) the radical Islamist terrorists who carry out these deadly acts do not do so in the name of Islam, and (2) attacks of this nature are for the most part for the most part retaliation for Islamophobia.
